Bound Noun man + Light Verb ha in Korean

This paper discusses a bound noun man construction that occurs with a light verb ha in Korean. Up to now, several studies (Kim 2010, Jung 2011, Cho 2004, Baek 2022, inter alia) have been proposed to account for its semantic and syntactic characteristics: Kim (2010) compares similar constructions in Korean, Japanese and Chinese and argues that an ability meaning is extended to an evaluation meaning. Jung (2011) discusses the grammaticalized nature of the bound noun man; Cho (2004) argues that the target structure involves a (pseudo)-passive operation; Baek (2022) argues that ha has its own argument structure and assigns a criterion theta-role to NP that is headed by the bound noun. This article, however, mainly focuses on the syntactic analysis and argues that, with an evaluation meaning, adnominal T lacks small v following Abe (1992) and Saito (2004). Furthermore, an external theta-role is assigned by small n that is related to the bound noun similar to the proposal given in Kim (2014) for a bound noun swu. In the case of a possibility meaning, the bound noun takes a phrase that has small v and an external argument is introduced directly by small v as usual.